How Chat and Youth Are Killing the Meeting

dominique_cimafranca writes "Forbes columnist Dan Woods describes a change in the way some companies handle meetings. Owing to instant messaging and younger tech-savvy CEOs, meeting time has gone down from as much as 30 hours per week to as little as 2 hours per week. Woods proposes ways to make this 'meetingless' management effective."

Comments

Bravo, Bravissimo

[ls671]

> meeting time has gone down from as much as 30 hours per week to as little as 2 hours per week

Bravo, Bravissimo. Many of us have been aware of time wasted on meetings for quite a while.

Let's be clear, planning is necessary and some meetings still might be needed. I guess almost everybody knows what I am talking about... ;-))

I am sure Dilbert hasn't got the monopoly on this topic but here are some links anyway...

http://www.dilbert.com/strips/comic/2008-11-23/

http://www.dilbert.com/fast/2001-12-15/

http://www.revold.no/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2010/02/Dilbert_MeetingMadness.jpg

http://brontesaurus.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2009/02/dilbert-meeting.gif

http://www.dilbert.com/dyn/str_strip/000000000/00000000/0000000/000000/30000/1000/900/31967/31967.strip.gif

http://slcta.net/images/dilbert2007112223221.gif

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[eln]

As much as we all despise meetings, they are often needed. I've seen email exchanges go on for days arguing about something that could have been resolved in about 15 minutes with a simple conference call. There's also the issue that workers can tend to feel lost or abandoned if they don't have at least semi-regular communication with their bosses, even if it's just a weekly status meeting. For whatever reason, email communication just doesn't serve the same purpose as effectively.

30 hours per week of meetings is definitely excessive (and lots of people in my organization have that and even more scheduled every single week), but 2 hours is, in most cases (especially for management), too little. The key is balance and making sure the meetings you schedule are effective and serve a definite purpose. Further, invitee lists for individual meetings should only include essential personnel. I've seen plenty of times when someone isn't quite sure who to invite, so rather than taking the time to find out they'll just invite anyone they can think of who might possibly have some input, which makes meetings chaotic and overly long. Further, recurring meetings should be kept short and to the point. Scheduling an hour every week is usually not necessary for most things, and if you schedule it people tend to try to fill that time, even when they don't have anything of real substance to add.

Meetings are not the scourge of business, improperly managed meetings are.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[Pharmboy]

Some of us really LIKE the work we do. Its the people we do it with that we don't like. If I had to do less actual work, and spend more time with the people I do the work with, I would quit.

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[TheLink]

In most real world meetings a participant's "CPU usage" is mostly idle during the entire meeting. This is very inefficient.

From a productivity point of view a big potential benefit of IM/IRC meetings is that participants can be in more than one meeting at the same time (and maybe even do other stuff too).

Also it is less disruptive if people leave the meeting briefly (toilet etc) and come back - because they can scroll back to see what they missed. As for minutes, they can just do a summary at the end (e.g. who is going to do what and by when) and then submit the entire log to a designated place (so managers/others can have a record of what's happening).

By allocating certain days/periods for "formal" IM meetings to be held, and allowing them to overlap, you can free up more time for people to do stuff that requires full concentration.

These sort of meetings might not be so acceptable with external parties, but they should be fine for many internal meetings.

I've actually suggested this at my workplaces before, but so far most seem to prefer "traditional meetings".

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[robot256]

As much as we all despise meetings, they are often needed. I've seen email exchanges go on for days arguing about something that could have been resolved in about 15 minutes with a simple conference call.

Then again, communicating properly in text is a skill that can be learned and developed. Young people who spend their lives text messaging have a great deal more experience expressing themselves in text than the previous generation, which may lead to more productive digital conversations.

Also, IM is different from email in that it is much easier to have a back-and-forth like in a spoken conversation. It also discourages having a huge CC list like emails where 15 people have to wade through two people's misunderstanding, saving the company a lot of time.

Furthermore, in some topics text can have a higher effective bandwidth than the spoken word. For programmers, the ability to send properly formatted code snippets back and forth is a big advantage over sitting in a meeting room with a white board. Plus, for a lot of problems you just need sparse but frequent communication with someone while you are working, and IM is perfect for when you aren't in the same room.

Meetings are not the scourge of business, improperly managed meetings are.

Kudos to that!

Re:Bravo, Bravissimo

[Magnus Pym]

Good points all. The other function that meetings serve (that completely bypasses the mostly socially handicapped tech folks, myself included) is providing the inter-personal glue that holds groups and companies together, builds comradeship and makes individuals feel part of the team.

I can see some technical people go to a meeting and come away thinking `what a horrible waste of time'. And maybe it was a waste to them. But be assured, for every such discontented individual, there are two that are served.

Of course, I am referring to well-run meetings and not `dick-size' meetings as described by a subsequent poster.

Or you could say...

[Anonymous Coward]

...these horrible technologies turn every hour of every day into an eternal meeting.

Help! We're wasting our time Doing Stuff!

[Rogerborg]

We need to get back to the Old Ways, where we invested all of time more wisely in Talking About Doing Stuff. We fear this new fangled "work".

Justify their Existence

[Qzukk]

Thirty hours of a forty-hour workweek devoted to meetings? I'm sure managers are getting nervous at the idea you can spend two hours a week on meetings and 38 hours a week getting stuff done.

Just like I have to show that I've gotten something done for the company in order to justify my paycheck, maybe it's time for the meeting-happy managers to show that their meetings have provided value to the company.

What is a meeting for?

[BadAnalogyGuy]

Ostensibly you hold meetings to do three things

1) Share current status
2) Discuss ideas
3) Plan

A good manager has all these worked out beforehand, and uses this preparation to lead the meeting effectively and efficiently.

If you are spending hours and hours in meetings with your team, something is terribly wrong.

Good grief

[Moraelin]

Good grief, if they had 30 hours of meetings per week, and probably a few more hours walking to the next meeting and whatnot, when did they have time to do any actual work? I'm affraid that just hearing about spending 30 hours a week in meetings tops everything I've ever read in a Dilbert strip.

That gives me kind of a snarky idea, though. I've long been under the impression that most meetings (or a large part of the time allocated to them) falls basically into two categories:

- substitute for a social life (think: the boss just wants to talk to some people)

- responsibility avoidance (think: we all talked about it for hours, hence nobody is personally responsible for any given decision or lack thereof. Sorta like why they give firing squads blanks too.)

There are of course sub-categories and nuances (e.g., the crying on each other's shoulder instead of taking a decision kind of meeting, or the kind that's not just a substitute for social contact, but a one-sided occasion to brag too.) But I think that as top-leve categories, those two would account for more than half of the time wasting.

I wonder if the reduction in meeting hours just has to do with, well, if you give a lonely boss email and IRC and IM and all, he can get his socializing fix without preventing his subordinates from working in the process.

Re:Corporate Instant Message, Aging Management

[Anonymous Coward]

phone has less of an audit trail

The real problem ...

[khasim]

Meetings are really dick-size wars. The manager that can call the most people to a meeting obviously has the biggest dick. And if you have to attend that meeting, your dick is smaller than his.

Once you get past the need for the ego boost, you notice that meetings drop off to almost nothing. No matter what the technology used, no matter what the industry.

Me, I turn it all off.

[thePowerOfGrayskull]

For at least three hours a day, I try to turn off my IM client and ignore my email. If I don't, I am not able to get enough focused effort on any one task in order to get things done.

The problem with replacing face-to-face with IMs and emails is that you turn what should be a few short meetings into long, drawn-out discussions that can continue pulling attention away for hours.

Re:Actually misguided

[NeutronCowboy]

* Make decisions beforehand with the key people. Most decisions don't really get made in the big meeting. Two or three key decision makers on the same page and the rest follow or simply refine the decision.

I can't stress this one enough. Meetings are not the place to hash out decisions - especially if they're cross-departmental meetings. I've had untold meetings wasted where we finally managed to get all the head honchos together in the same room, and we spend the hour trying to come to an agreement on point 1, sub-point a.

Instead, have an individual talk with the people who either sign the pay checks or who have some sort of authority to make things happen. Come to an agreement before the meeting, and then just present the conclusions. Yes, you should still listen to objections from others in the meeting - after all, everyone's there for a reason. But you should never, ever walk have a meeting without knowing exactly who is going to say what.

If you can make this happens, meetings are short, productive, and leave people happy. Everything else is icing on the cake.